The morning commute yesterday was a little bumpy. It wasn’t from the potholes, lane dots, or even my neighbor’s lawn gnomes.

No, the bump in my path yesterday was one of God’s most darling little creatures: an adorable little rabbit.

I guess I shouldn’t say that he was little, because he was actually a sizeable critter, and I can’t say with any certainy that he was adorable, because I only saw him for a second and a half before he vanished under my headlights with a sickening thump. I merely assume that as an instance of the rabbit() class, he inherited the value var cute = true. I can, however, say that he was white and fluffy, and didn’t exactly look or move like a feral lagomorph; in fact, he gaily hopped in front of my bumper in the most heartrendingly happy, bouncy, Easter bunny sort of way.

I must have been going a lot faster than I thought I was, because I either atomized the poor little bunny-wunny, or bounced him off my car some twenty feet into the roadside greenery, because I couldn’t see him in my rear-view mirror.

I can’t shake the suspicion that somewhere, a kid is crying to his mama because Fluffy has been missing for the last two nights. Sorry, kid. I turned Fluffy into street pizza. In my defense, though, I also suspect it was suicide?not that it would be any comfort to the kid.

One more hole-punch in my one-way ticket to Hell.

I spent some time today wallowing in nostalgia for my professional cooking days. Perhaps I should have titled this post “En Busca del Tiempo Perdidos”.

It’s been a long time since I toiled in kitchens for a living. Every once in a while I get a bit nostalgic about it, though I usually snap out of it quickly, remembering the luxuries I currently enjoy, such as doing laundry that doesn’t reek of onions and grease, working less than sixty hours a week, having weekends off (to say nothing of holidays: for every person who says “hey, let’s go out to eat on Mother’s Day”, there are a dozen line cooks, dishwashers, and busboys saying “fuck you”), not to mention the annual guessing game as to whether or not half your staff is going to show up the morning after Cinco de Mayo.

Still, I drift into the occasional reverie about my years in salt-and-pepper pants; I guess you can take the chef out of the kitchen, but not the kitchen out of the chef. Or something like that.

The unexpected trigger for this morning’s wistful recollection was the Beck song
“Qu? Onda Guero” [link goes to the iTMS]. It’s been a long, long, time since I was called “Guero”, “Jefe”, or any one of a number of colorful Spanish nicknames; a long time since I spoke Spanish every day. I found myself really missing the guys I worked with during the course of my cooking career, and the whole Spanglish culture you find in the back of pretty much every non-Asian restaurant.

Some kitchens are all-immigrant, others are more cholo in nature, but wherever you go, chances are good there’s a crew of vatos in the back dishing out the grub. I should know; I used to be one. I spoke Spanish with a chilango’s accent, though I was asked more than once which part of Michoacan I came from (apparently a lot of Michoacanos don’t have a lot of pre-Columbian blood in them, so I passed as Mexican).

There’s been a lot of anti-immigrant talk in this country lately, particularly about illegal immigration from Mexico, and how they’re “stealing our jobs”. I know it’s common wisdom this is bullshit, but let me confirm that: it’s total bullshit. I can tell you right now that 95% of the guys who showed up at the back doors of my restaurants looking for a job were born south of the Rio Grande. Most of them worked their asses off, and I know how hard they worked: I started out as a dishwasher and clawed my way up into management. I was working alongside them (much to their surprise; in a lot of kitchens I was the only white boy back there) long before I was their boss. Collectively, they were a great bunch of crazy, macho, ass-kicking, hard-drinking, funny sons of bitches, and I miss them, even if there’s no chance in hell I’m going back to the kitchens.

Yo te recuerdo, mis cu?ados.

When I saw this picture of Bill Gates, I knew there had to be comedy gold to be mined from it somehow.

Here’s my first humble effort. Now go ye forth and wreak your own havoc.

I couldn’t resist the urge to cut over to the new site software, WordPress, even though all my dicking around with their canned style sheets isn’t 100% finished yet, and, well, a few images and links will be broken for a bit, and, um, I have to backfill all the archives…

But still, hey! New! Shiny! Database-driven! You gotta love it.

Right?

*cough*

I’m dying to know now how the Republican party can possibly position themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility in the upcoming elections. Remember the huge budget fracas in 1995-1996, when the GOP took such a stand against deficit spending that they shut the federal government down to force President Clinton to submit a balanced budget? Do you remember that principled (if dangerous) stand for fiscal sanity?

So now we have a solidly Republican government that has no sense of financial responsibility. Instead of “tax and spend” Democrats (a favorite old conservative cliché), we have “spend and spend” Republicans. Ten years ago the weekly GOP radio address called deficit spending not only wrong, but immoral.

Yet here we are again, spending more money we don’t fucking have. Our debt has, as of yesterday, iincreased by about 42% since Bush took office. Clinton presided over a debt increase factor of 36%. Neither is good, but it doesn’t sound like the “conservative” party is exactly putting the brakes on spending. The Administration’s apologists point to the emergencies that have arisen as a primary driver of budget-breaking items. OK, I’m willing to buy that, but we can’t even point to any successes achieved by all this emergency spending. Iraq? A bloody, chaotic, overpriced mess. Afghanistan? Our puppet rules Kabul and not a whole lot else. New Orleans? It’s still shamefully fucked up, and lies within our own borders, no less.

Just remember, GOP voters: you can’t blame this shit on liberals anymore. You’re large and in charge. The Democrats are hiding under the bed. It’s all you. You want to show us liberals how it’s done? Fine. Now’s your chance. Prove you’re really fiscally conservative, and not just drunk with power. Prove you can actually fix more things than you break.

I dare you.

You know, a lot of people have been bitching recently about how Apple "overhyped" the recent product launches of the iPod stereo speakers and the Intel processors going into the Mac minis. Never mind the fact that Apple didn’t overhype squat; they just sent out an invitation to members of the press to come and attend a press conference.

Some of the loudest howling has come from the Mac faithful who were apparently disappointed that Apple didn’t announce… um, well, I don’t know what the hell they were expecting, but Apple didn’t announce it, so clearly the company sucks. I was trying to come up with some sort of funny post about that, but inspiration never struck. Happily, the Joy of Tech did it for me, and they tell it like it is.